Catholics around the world celebrated Vocation Sunday last weekend by focusing on those who commit their working lives to the church. But many prayers were more fervent than usual after renewed predictions that the number of Catholic priests in Britain is set to halve in the next decade.
Hundreds of parish churches across the United Kingdom will have to close as the number of Catholic priests continues its steady fall from its peak of 7 000 in the 1960s. Just 38 men entered the seven Catholic seminaries in Britain this year to train to become priests.
Professor Noel Timms, a Catholic academic, this week warned that the recruitment crisis had worsened in the three years since he forecast the halving of the priesthood in the next 10 to 15 years.
”The pope says you can’t fiddle around with the structure or the status of priests, you just have to increase the numbers. That’s ridiculous. The church will have to think about ordaining women and look at celibacy. That’s not just about attracting more new priests. It is about undermining the cultic nature of the priesthood and making us more priestly.”
The demand that men commit to a life without sex is at the heart of the recruitment crisis, according to Timms. ”It is increasingly difficult for people to see the personal point of it for them. Because of trends in sexuality it looks as if you are cutting yourself off from a set of very important experiences in life if you become a celibate priest.”
The church marked Vocation Sunday by distributing leaflets to all parishes and schools across the country promoting the benefits of the priesthood. Websites have been set up to draw people considering a church career.
Senior church figures stress that the number of priests is still rising worldwide. While there is a decline in England and Wales, the presence of 5 000 priests remains the third-highest ratio of priests to Catholics in the world.
But many accept that clever recruitment drives or modern marketing will not be enough to repopularise the priesthood. Senior figures say the church is battling against social changes, including the secularisation of society, that are sapping the desire of people to make any kind of lifelong commitment, including joining the priesthood.
People are wondering whether the church is going down the drain.
Reverend Kieran Conry, the bishop of Arundel and Brighton, said: ”We could ordain married men and relax the rules about celibacy and eventually ordain women, but it is not clear that would have a significant impact because the Church of England is in a similar position in terms of recruitment.”
Father Kevin Dring, director of the national office for vocation, admitted that the church faced ”a big challenge”. He said any recruitment mission had to be ”backed up with something deeper”.
New priests are only going to come from pews, he said and he called for some of the one million Catholics who attend mass in Britain to ”take up the responsibility for vocations”.
Dring added: ”It would be naive to say celibacy was not a factor but it is given more emphasis than it deserves. There is so much peer pressure against young people committing to a life as a priest.
”There is a certain inertia experienced by all churches in this country at the moment and that is reflected in vocation. But there are vocations and there are good people in our seminaries. Quality not quantity is what we need.
”You can’t quickly and easily turn the tide, but we hope to increase the number of people coming into the priesthood. We need to work very hard. Ultimately, it is in God’s hands.”
The church dismisses the idea of importing priests from the burgeoning churches in Africa, Asia and South America. Instead, it is pinning its hopes on another social trend: the increasing number of active older people in society.
Recruiting priests at 18 is a thing of the past, and many of those now joining the priesthood are in their 40s and 50s, who have found their vocation later in life and are prepared for a radical career change. — Â